The timeline
- Morning — The idea: a one-tap “running low” button for shared office supplies. Quick assessment of the gap and the adoption risk. Name picked: RestockThat.
- Midday — A tappable prototype is built and reviewed end to end — manager setup, coworker tap flow, live list. Pricing set at $9 per office.
- Afternoon — The MVP is scaffolded: manager auth, QR code generation, public tap pages, live lists, printable sticker sheets. Smoke-tested end to end within ~10 hours.
- Evening — Deployed and live at restockthat.com. Idea to production in about ten hours.
The hard parts
- The no-app tap flow. The whole product stands or falls on a coworker tapping a sticker and adding an item with zero friction: no install, no account, no login screen. The public tap page had to work from any phone camera in seconds.
- One engine, two label types. Printed QR sheets for day one, NFC tap tags as the paid upsell — both resolving into the same list engine through the same claim flow.
- Manager auth without coworker auth. Real accounts with hashed passwords and cookie sessions for managers; coworkers never see a password field.
- Printable sticker sheets. Server-side QR generation laid out for real printers, because the pilot lives or dies on a sheet of paper stuck to a supply closet.
Stack
Node.js + Express, SQLite through better-sqlite3, server-rendered pages, QR codes generated with the qrcode library. Passwords hashed with bcrypt, sessions in signed cookies. Deployed on a self-hosted Ubuntu box with Docker Compose, exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel. No cloud bill.